Re: Left AS/400 and Returned

[R Bruce Hoffman <bruce.hoffman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I worked for a company that, in 1994, decided that the three AS400's
(one 300GB+ production machine, one 50GB development machine, one
sandbox machine, a 20S IIRC, and 8+ million lines of custom code in RPG,
COBOL and PL/I) decided that it was time to replace everything in a
"Business Re-Engineering" project.

To what? AIX and Informix. 

I recommended upgrading the boxes to RISC, installing and using DataProp
and deploying the data warehouse from another 400. They said no. There
were committed to coming off the 400 platform.

That was it for me. I went back to consulting.

For three years they tried just to get a basic data warehouse running
that was accurate and could be updated from the 80,000+ active contracts
maintained on the 400s in less than 3 days.

Never happened.

3 years, 15+ MILLION dollars later... what did they do? They fired the
contract firm that had convinced them to do this in the first place.
They upgraded all their 400s. They installed Data Propagator. They built
the warehouse on a 400.

Still up today.

By the way, out of 24 or so, highly skilled, multi-language, VERY loyal,
in-house trained programmers, all but one or two have left. So the
company lost a LOT more than $15 million.




On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 19:58, Frances Denoncourt wrote:
> Have any of you moved all of your apps AND data off the AS/400 on to an
> SQL server and then moved back to the AS/400 (at least for data) or
> really wished you could?
> 
> Looks like we are not only moving the apps to the dotnet world but also
> our data.
> 
> Should I be scared silly?? 
> Any horror stories?
> 
> Thanks - I think.
> 
> Fran Denoncourt
> Sr. Programmer/Analyst
> Pinal County Treasurer's Office
> Florence, AZ 85232
> (520) 866-6404
> 
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